N1 Grid Service Provisioning System

N1 Grid Service Provisioning System (N1 Grid SPS) automates application provisioning through "one-touch" installation, configuration, and updating of thousands of servers in the data center. The software enables IT organizations to automate the complex application provisioning process, making it quick and reliable and enabling complex services to be rolled out in a day or less. This helps reduce the time to deploy, along with operating expenses, and it increases application uptime through the elimination of errors.

The N1 Grid SPS provides life cycle management for applications and services. From the perspective of the N1 Grid SPS, a service is the complete set of software components, excluding base operating systems, that must be deployed for that service to run. These components include operating system patches or service packs, applications (for example, a database server or an application server cluster), and custom content (for example, the content of database table spaces, the Enterprise Java Beans, the COM/COM+/.Net components to be loaded into an application server instance, or the static HTML content for a web server tier).

N1 Grid SPS enables services to be captured from reference implementations. After the nature of the service is defined and the components added to the N1 Grid SPS repository of services, the service can be automatically deployed and redeployed. In addition, running instances of the service or components of that service (for example, a web server instance) can be compared with another running instance or with the repository to ensure consistency. New versions of services or patches can be captured to enable upgrades and rollback, as desired. A single instance of N1 Grid SPS can manage hundreds or thousands of applications or services and thousands of individual servers.

Complexity Management

IT organizations have three choices for responding to the complexity inherent in configuring, deploying, and modifying applications. First, they can attempt to reduce complexity by standardizing hardware and software. Unfortunately, replacing existing systems is expensive, and standardization is difficult to accomplish across all business units. Second, they can increase their staff to cope with the greater workload another expensive proposition that introduces problems of its own, such as those inherent in coordinating a large team. And third, they can adopt a comprehensive software system for application configuration and deployment. This software systematically automates the configuration, deployment, and analysis of applications.

Following this approach, application deployment and IT organizations can:

• Automate manual deployment processes to accelerate the time to market for key applications and to eliminate operator error

• Perform rapid root-cause analysis when something goes wrong, significantly reducing application down time

• Capture every change made to every server, providing complete visibility into and control over the application environment

For a complete overview of implementing the N1 Grid SPS software, download:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/whitepapers/service_provisioning/ManagingComplexityWP.pdf

Application Awareness

The overwhelming challenge for data center operations personnel is managing complex application environments. Operations teams constantly deploy third-party applications, as well as applications, upgrades, and patches developed in-house. They are tasked with making application configuration changes for security and performance tuning, and they are responsible for tracking and analyzing the configuration and state of deployed applications. They must also accomplish all of this for an ever-increasing number of applications under severe time and human resource constraints.

For technology to effectively address these challenges, it must be application aware. It must manage the configuration and deployment of applications at a higher level than that of files and directories. A smart technology would capture knowledge about an application, such as its configuration methods and dependency requirements. True end-to-end automation of the deployment process is possible only when a technology understands that infrastructure elements such as web servers, application servers, and databases, and application elements, such as custom code and content, must all work together to make a functioning web application.

For more information about application awareness and the N1 Grid SPS software, download:

http://wwws.sun.com/software/whitepapers/service_provisioning/ApplicationAwarenessWP.pdf